Menyhard 120

Consultant:

Dr. Gáspár Orsolya

Year: 2021

Menyhard 120

What do the Szt. István Tápszergyár in Kőbánya, Budapest and the Szabadkikötő of Csepel (Budapest) have in common? István Menyhárd, one of the iconic figures of Hungarian reinforced concrete shell construction designed and built at both locations some quadrilateral shell roofs in the 1930s. This was an outstanding achievement internationally, as the analytical solution based on membrane theory of quadrilateral shells itself had been published only a few years earlier by French engineer Ferdinand Aimond. Apart from Menyhart, only Aimond in France and Giorgo Baroni in Italy built similar structures,at about the same time. Research and documentation of French and Italian examples has recently been published [1,2] – attesting to the recent interest in the early history of hyperbolic shells. Unfortunately both Hungarian examples have been destroyed already. The 120th anniversary of István Menyhárd’s birth in 2022 offers a special reason to document these two remarkable forerunners of hungarian shell construction – using the secondary resources (starting [3] ) available. Specific tasks: Data collection (literature survey, archive material), 3D reconstruction, can be extended to retrospective structural analysis, according to interest.